Travel odyssey to Telluride

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It's been a real odyssey for many snowboard cross athletes to get from the SBX World Cup opener in Schruns/Montafon, Austria, to Telluride, CO, over the last couple of days.

A lot of teams had to fly via Frankfurt to the US and it was the airport in Frankfurt which faced some troubles with the snow.

2006 and 2010 Olympic Champion Seth Wescott said: “They had one de-icing truck, there were so many planes lining up.”

In addition, people had to queue in super long lines with a progressing rate of one passenger every 15 minutes in order to re-schedule their flight itineraries (see photo provided by Seth Wescott).

However, the US SBX star made it faster to Telluride than the Austrians, who actually were 55 hours on tour.

In Frankfurt, the SBX crew sat more than six hours in the plane before the flight finally got cancelled due to the weather conditions.

Head coach Tom Greil and co-trainer Gerald Kerschhackel then managed to re-book the flights for Monday, flying via Washington to Salt Lake City.

From the 2002 Olympic host, the snowboarders took a rental car and drove all the way to Telluride where they arrived Tuesday morning at 5 AM local time.

However, due to that route, all board bags made it to their final destination, but not all normal bags.

“I had to ask for some pants, helmets and goggles,” explained Susi Moll (AUT), who had won the inaugural Team SBX in Europe last weekend together with Maria Ramberger (AUT).

The small Brazilian team as well as the Germans and several others got hit even worse.

After a total of 36 hours from door to door, Isabel Ribeiro Clark is still waiting for her boards and actually did borrowed one to be able to train today.

Team Germany is also waiting for the boards which is spread over Salt Lake and Dallas. Reigning World Champion Alex Pullin still waits for some custom made gear and won't get it in time for the first training runs.

The training itself got postponed till 2:30 PM today, as the organizers lost some time to prepare the course due to a broken water hose which causes a dirt avalanche over the course.